How we’re empowering teachers with high-quality assessment

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, assessment remains a critical challenge for schools and teachers.

Teachers often grapple with assessments that fail to provide meaningful insights into student progress, especially at Key Stage 3. They can spend hours writing and marking tests in order to report arbitrary raw scores that fail to give them, parents or school leaders confidence in how students are performing or the understanding they need to help them improve.

At United Learning, we believe that effective assessment should be more than just a measure of student performance. It should be a powerful tool that informs and enhances teaching and learning to help students progress.

Our vision for effective assessment

To achieve that, we’re developing an approach to assessment built on four key principles:

Validity and reliability

Assessments need to be valid – that is, they should accurately measure students’ progress through the curriculum.

Good tests should be designed by assessment experts to ensure they’re assessing the right thing in a consistent and reliable way, and giving all students the opportunity to show what they know and can do.

Actionable insights

Teachers should have access to detailed breakdowns of student performance, identifying strengths and areas for improvement at both individual and class levels.

Well-designed assessments supported by powerful analysis tools can show teachers exactly what their students can do well and where there’s an opportunity to improve.

Benchmarking

We also think it’s important to understand performance in a broader context.

We standardise our assessments using data from the tens of thousands of students in our schools, so we can report cohort-benchmarked results to provide valuable insights into how students are performing compared to their peers nationally.

This also helps us to understand how students are progressing over time, to help every student realise their potential.

Balance

We recognise that written tests are not always the right approach. Over time, we want to make sure our assessments are ‘authentic’ to the subject.

While summative assessment is important, we also believe that it should not be overused, especially in light of significant national concerns about student mental health and teacher workload.

Alongside our twice-yearly summative assessments, we’re working to strengthen our approach to formative and lower-stakes assessment, to take the burden off tests – and off teachers and students.

Principles into practice

Initially, we have adopted these principles in our development of high-quality assessments for Key Stage 3.

Created by our curriculum and assessment specialists alongside experienced teachers, our tests are designed to be valid and reliable and to provide detailed, meaningful feedback to pupils and teachers. Working with Smartgrade, we can standardise our assessments and make benchmarked analysis immediately available for our schools in an easy-to-use format.

This partnership has allowed our teachers to access the meaningful summative and formative data they need, and it is now enabling us to invite all schools to benefit from our approach.

We’ve decided to share our new Year 7 end-of-year assessments with schools outside the group, and we’re excited to make them available – with powerful analysis tools – free for any school that wishes to use them this year.

Sharing our innovation

Our approach is already empowering our teachers, giving them the insights they really need to inform teaching and learning. It’s also providing students with clear feedback on their progress and areas for improvement.

More than that, it is allowing leaders to see how individuals, classes and schools are performing in the national context, to spot patterns and trends quickly, and to take action at the right level to support progress.

As a sector, we must prioritise discussion about effective assessment in education.  We’re excited about the potential impact of this work beyond our own schools, and we hope that by sharing our journey and our resources, we can play a part in improving educational outcomes for students across the country.

Find out more about using United Learning’s assessments free this summer here